Journey woman

Nun on horseback

I’m a lifelong journey fan. No, not the band, the actual move-across-the-surface-of-the-planet version. As a Navy kid, I grew up with a passport in one hand, and a ticket in the other, as comfortable crossing borders as I was crossing my fingers when promising I wouldn’t venture outside my prescribed geographic boundaries. The places I wasn’t supposed to go always looked so much more interesting.

Sangfroid combined with a sense of adventure have been my modus operandi for decades now, which explains how I managed to put myself in a situation where I had to talk my way out of police custody in Saudi Arabia (you’ll have to buy me single-barrel bourbon to hear that story), and why I lived alone on a sailboat for twelve years.

Do people who stay in one place all their lives use the same definition of the word “journey” that I do? I’ve had more than a decade to ruminate on that, since my move from the Big Apple to the place I’ve come to call (mostly with tongue firmly planted in cheek) Jimbobwe.

{module Share this!|none}The map-wise journey from one of the biggest cities on earth to a small burg—Richmond, Va., where some of the inhabitants aren’t quite convinced that the Civil W … War of Northern Aggression is really over—was short. The two cities are, after all, only a little more than 300 miles apart.

The other journey, the one involving the space between my ears, was much more … Himalayan. Confession time: I’m a damn Yankee. For real. My great-grandfather fought in a blue uniform, in a Pennsylvania regiment, in the aforementioned WONA. And, since my family has been career military since World War I, my worldview is very different than that of many of the folks I find myself journeying alongside these days.

I work hard to hide my eye-rolls. I stifle myself, with only a modicum of success, when it comes to the liberal sprinkling of f-bombs that my long stay in New York and long career in TV news make me prone to fling when vexed.

What I’ve come to realize is the journey between my ears has mirrored my geographic one in that my worldview is less anchored by place than it is by community. One of the first things one learns as a kid who moves a lot is to identify co-conspirators quickly—find the kids who think like you do, and together you can plot to overthrow the nuns.

We never actually did overthrow the nuns, but we ran great guerilla campaigns that kept them on their toes and firmly attached to their rosaries and weaponized yardsticks. I managed this in several schools in a succession of towns and cities, making my career in network news a foregone conclusion long before I arrived in New York. All good journeys inform the next journey, don’t they?

I got a chance, two years before my Great White Way to Cradle of the Confederacy voyage, to journey through the Smoky Mountains on a road trip with my sister. We called this episode “Thelma & Louise: Book Two,” roaring down I-81 from the D.C. suburbs, where my sister lives, to Nashville and Memphis to celebrate her “if I tell you, she’ll have to kill you” birthday.

My promise to take her to Nashville (she’s a country music fan) for this ends-in-a-zero milestone anchored the trip. Memphis was part of the plan because I was going to have to rinse country-music cooties off me with some good, sweaty blues. I am so-very-not a fan of the Hat Act that country music has become.

On the way back north, we took a slow roll east on I-40 to Asheville, N.C., where I learned an invaluable lesson, one that would make it possible for me to move to Richmond and not become a crime statistic—as a perp, not as a victim.

I had heard from many people, over many years, that Asheville was a small jewel of a city. That statement hardly does it justice, though. As we walked around downtown assessing our dining choices—much better than expected, and we’d expected plenty—I was surprised at the number of people on the street. Walking on Broadway in Asheville, I found myself pressed by as much of a crowd as I would expect to experience on Broadway in New York.

We soon found out why: the Kirov Ballet was in town, at the Civic Center. Smoky Mountain-area balletomanes were swarming to see one of the top troupes in the world bust a major series of moves. As we walked past the marquee, I looked up and saw that WWE RAW was in town in two days. Kirov, WWE. Sublime, utterly ridiculous. Back to back, in the same venue.

The lesson I learned from the smart folks who live in Asheville and environs? Find your community. The people who love what you love, and flock to see it. Ignore the rest. Live and let live. That might be a bit more difficult in a small city, where there’s less available anonymity … yet even a damn Yankee can learn something new on the streets of a small Southern city.